The entertainment industry has developed a new genre of movie/television entertainment called “Reality TV,” or “unscripted programming.” In this genre, untrained actors are placed in various settings with general direction and rules to guide their interactions, but without a specific script for actions or dialog. Beforehand, the production staff has a general idea of the storyline for the production, but the final storyline will depend upon the interactions that take place. Several video cameras are located within the settings and record the interactions among the actors for long periods of time. Various stimuli may be introduced into the settings by the production staff to provoke unpredictable interactions among the actors. After several settings have been videotaped for several hours over several days by several cameras, the production staff reviews hundreds to thousands of hours of videotape and constructs a final storyline for the TV production (i.e., media work).
In a typical production, the raw video material is reviewed by several people, typically in the range of 10 to 50, each doing a specific task, such as logging, transcribing, scanning for story points, story writing, and setting creative directions. To review raw video material, each of the hundreds of videotapes is duplicated several times, and the duplicates are distributed among the production staff. Transcribers then create transcripts of the tapes, and loggers create files that describe the actors and actions present in each tape. The transcripts and logs are then reviewed by storywriters, producers, and directors to identify video tapes to review and to develop storylines for the TV production. The large volume of video material, however, has made it difficult for the production staff to communicate with one another and correctly identify important video scenes. This impedes the creativity and productivity of the producers and the storywriters. In addition, the task of navigating between the transcripts, logs, and video tapes for a user is difficult and time-consuming. Because of this difficulty, and because of the need to have physical access to the duplicate tapes, the production staff is essentially forced to work out of a central facility.
The above problems have hindered the production and development of unscripted programming. A solution to these problems is needed to ease the production of unscripted programming and to enable the genre to expand in new creative directions.